UCL BLOOMSBURY PROJECT

Progressive

Fellowship of the New Life

History

It was founded in 1883 by Thomas Davidson, Scottish philosopher, scholar, and educationalist, as a non-dogmatic but quasi-monastic movement for his existing followers (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)

One of its earliest endeavours was to open an experimental commune in Doughty Street (Kevin Manton, ‘The Fellowship of the New Life: English Ethical Socialism Reconsidered’, History of Political Thought, vol. 24, no. 2, 2003)

A splinter group (quickly joined by the then newly-emerging playwright and campaigner George Bernard Shaw) broke away in 1884 to become the Fabian Society (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)

Davidson, who had been teaching in St. Louis, Missouri (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography), returned to America in 1884 with another of the Fellowship’s founders, Percival Chubb and the Fellowship was thereafter run by Maurice Adams and J. F. Oakeshott (Kevin Manton, ‘The Fellowship of the New Life: English Ethical Socialism Reconsidered’, History of Political Thought, vol. 24, no. 2, 2003)

Edward Carpenter, author, anti-vivisectionist, vegetarian, teetotaller, and campaigner for homosexual equality, came to be associated with the Fellowship (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)

From 1888 to 1889 Carpenter lived with Cecil Reddie, a Ruskin-inspired educationalist; they and the Fellowship planned the pioneering and progressive Abbotsholme School in Derbyshire, which opened in 1889 (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)

Other members included the journalist William Clarke, the author on sexuality Havelock Ellis, the lesbian writer and lecturer Edith Lees, who was Secretary of the Fellowship until she married Havelock Ellis in 1891, and the future Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, who was also Secretary of the Fellowship at one time (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)

Those who had been members but who joined the Fabian Society at the split included Edward Pease and Frank Podmore, active in the Fabian Society and also subsequently in the Society for Psychical Research, and possibly the children’s author E. Nesbit, who was a disciple of Thomas Davidson (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)

Some of the group were Christian rather than just spiritual, and there were differing levels of commitment to the same ethically-based, non-dogmatic, socialist aims in this predominantly middle-class association (Kevin Manton, ‘The Fellowship of the New Life: English Ethical Socialism Reconsidered’, History of Political Thought, vol. 24, no. 2, 2003)

From 1889 they published a journal, called The Sower (first issue) and subsequently Seed-Time (Kevin Manton, ‘The Fellowship of the New Life: English Ethical Socialism Reconsidered’, History of Political Thought, vol. 24, no. 2, 2003)

The editor of the journal was the free thinker and moral philosopher Maurice Adams (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)

By the early 1890s the focus of the group had moved to Croydon (Kevin Manton, ‘The Fellowship of the New Life: English Ethical Socialism Reconsidered’, History of Political Thought, vol. 24, no. 2, 2003)

Some of its members, including Maurice Adams, became members of the Croydon Ethical and Religious Fellowship, part of the British Ethical Movement (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)

Adams edited the last issue of Seed-Timein 1898; this issue announced the disbanding of the Society (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)

The group faded from view as the Fabian Society and eventually the political Labour Party took over socialist thinking in England

However, Abbotsholme School is still flourishing; it was the first school to offer sex-education classes, it continues to include in its curriculum practical work on the estate’s own farm, and it pioneered outdoor education through hiking and camping trips

What was reforming about it?

It was an early socialist movement which tried to encourage and practise harmonious living through a union of moral and material reforms (Kevin Manton, ‘The Fellowship of the New Life: English Ethical Socialism Reconsidered’, History of Political Thought, vol. 24, no. 2, 2003)

Specific reforms sought by its members included “an eight-hour day, the end of sweating, decent working conditions, sanitary housing at rents controlled by the municipality, municipalization of utilities and transport, heavy taxes on rent, government workshops for the unemployed, free education, government control of food safety standards, national insurance schemes and land nationalization” (Kevin Manton, ‘The Fellowship of the New Life: English Ethical Socialism Reconsidered’, History of Political Thought, vol. 24, no. 2, 2003)

It also opened co-operative industrial communities around England

Where in Bloomsbury

It operated Fellowship House, an experimental commune, at 29 Doughty Street, in the 1880s and 1890s